


three stories

by pendules



Series: project 6 [3]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-23
Updated: 2014-04-23
Packaged: 2018-01-20 12:10:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1509974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendules/pseuds/pendules
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story of alternatives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	three stories

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in July, 2008.

The society one lives in currently is never an old one. A society is a constantly changing, constantly moving, constantly growing being. One may group the years of man into centuries of commonality, or decades, years, or even as specific as months, but still, these are generalisations, and such generalisations are never accurate.

The truth: the world you lived in yesterday is never the same one you wake up to today.

(But, nevertheless, that old principle applies that 'what goes around comes around.')

 

Ancient Greece existed two thousand years ago, but Iker, here and now, worries about losing what he holds dear to the world.

(And, that too: in every society since the beginning of time, there is a hierarchy, a pyramid (a food chain); some might argue that this is to establish order, and everything needs order, though it might not necessarily be fair (it never is). But the question is there: who decides? Who decides who the slaves are and who the masters are. Who decides who has the fame, the money, the everything, and who has nothing.)

 

The world, constantly changing, constantly moving, constantly growing (constantly shrinking—there is a price: but the rate of the forward reaction equals the rate of the backward one, so that there is dynamic equilibrium, and so it remains constant in some way; there are always problems to match the successes, suffering equivalent to development), and Iker gives up a piece of himself everyday.

(And in all the changing, like furniture being moved around a tiny apartment, these parts are lost. And they mean nothing, tomorrow, when the earth sees yet another sunrise.)

 

David claims he knows of no hierarchy, and Iker is not affronted, because David, everything he is, is also blind to the real world, the hypocrisy, the lies and deceit. (He won't be able to survive in it.)

He convinces himself thoroughly that the world is as he sees it. And it should be, it should.

(But it won't: not in another life, not a millennium from now.)

 

David lives off the world, his world; they are not one without the other. He loves it. It loves him. 

For now.

But wait—wait for the next dramatic tilt in its axis of rotation, the next time it steers off course (and it does so every single day; one wrong turn, and it's gone forever—the life you've become so accustomed to that it's not one without the other).

 

Iker knows better. He knows not to depend on it.

(But the one mistake he made: depending on him.)

 

One day, it will crash down on him (crash down on both of them—because now, they are not one without the other).

 

Iker cries in the summer of '07, not because he leaves, but because this is when he realises this.

 

And he's not obsessing, he really isn't, but—

 

Ways it could have (should have) happened:-

i. David never comes. He stays, stays in England, and the country he's dying to play for again succeeds in killing him, sometime, in some way.

But it was never permanent, not in this life, not in any other he could have led—because he doesn't know the meaning of that—of (true) permanency. Iker, he's always had that, in a city, in a country, that sense of eternal belonging, and he would feel sorry for him if he didn't smile in the face of all of it.

Because the truth is that: he has nothing to ground him, nothing he will be intrinsically linked to and associated with a hundred years or two hundred from now—he will just be David Beckham, as he is now, an entity all on his own. (And to be a name, all on your own, is to be a lonely soul.) But just as easily, all that can be taken away, and no one might remember him at all—the world, constantly changing, constantly moving, constantly growing, might forget him.

Because he doesn't have invisible (golden) chains wrapped around his ankles and wrists, chains that only stretch so much, whose ends are buried in the earth in a particular spot (home) to lead him back there—not like Iker. He is, essentially, a helium balloon with no one holding on to it. Free to rise and fly and soar, but not like a bird, who knows its migration paths and its way back home—but can be lost forever on a current.

Manchester was not his link—(though he had said, and thought, many times, not long ago, when acceptance of any sort was refused any time the notion even appeared to him, _I'm not Gary, and this isn't yours. I'm not yours._ )

—and never Real.

But he had to come, had to leave—because the truth: the world is his. (Now. For a moment. This moment.)

 

ii. He isn't David Beckham.

But along with this goes the fact that Iker would not be Iker either.

And maybe this is the real truth: Iker is his ground, his earth—the thing that will always link him to something real and tangible—his love for him—the one thing that the world does not get to see.

 

iii. He doesn't leave. He stays. Here. Madrid.

And when he dies, he will have something: something the world doesn't share (the only thing)—something that is wholly and completely his—

 

Iker is his forever.


End file.
